Manufacturing Engineer Review

The placement was great - I enjoyed the work, the people both in the office and working with other departments, and the variety of work with on average around 20-30% of your time being spent away from the desk.

The guys in the Manufacturing Engineering office were brilliant,

Fantastic support, perhaps the best part of the placement. Desk based in between supervisor and senior manufacturing engineer. Learnt a huge amount from the other engineers. Almost every person I worked with inside the company was very helpful and enjoyable to work with, great atmosphere.

Incredibly busy, however the tasks and projects were almost always interesting and involved lots of problem solving, project management and working with all levels of people whether it be shop floor operators, production managers, manufacturing engineers, product engineers, design engineers, industrial engineers, quality engineers, new product introduction and a range of suppliers so the work was rarely dull and gave a broad range of experiences.

The responsibility given was great, a lot of faith put in you by supervisors and and you effectively operate and are treated as a proper manufacturing engineer for a year. If your supervisor is in a different meeting or off work you fully take over responsibility as manufacturing engineer for your line.

As well as experience of engineering in a large manufacturing company you will gain soft skills time management, prioritising, working in teams, managing people, managing change. If you are looking to become a Mechanical engineer this placement may not involve too much theory and calculations from your degree course but it will give a great insight into how the products you'll design and analyse which actually be produced and how to design products for manufacture.

The atmosphere was great - couldn't have asked for better people to work with. Always up for a laugh, happy to help, great office. The Man Eng office i a seperate office with between 8-14 people in it depending on how many students or apprentices are in at the time and this contributes to the great atmosphere. Other departments were again great to work with and very helpful.

The placement was fairly well organised with a 4 week changeover period with the previous student and some organised training sessions to begin with although most of the training is on the job.

There's a few organised training courses, and if you would like to spend a few days in other roles or departments people are happy to organise this. The best part of the development was working very closely with the experienced engineers so gaining skills in this way. Every student is also allocated an IMechE mentor, a senior engineer from a different department who you organise monthly meetings with to support your development and advise on the quarterly IMechE reports.

I would definitely like to go back and work at Cummins in a graduate role.

There are around 30-35 placement students at Cummins Daventry with the majority based in the main Engine Plant/Tech Centre combined building. The other students were great, lots of students often having lunch at the same time and some socials were organised. The football teams were great.

Daventry is cheap but you wouldn't particularly want to go there!

Daventry does have one nightclub as well as a few pubs and bars which although can be entertaining are not the greatest/classiest of establishments. The nightlife is pretty terrible and although you could make the trip to Northampton/Leamington/Birmingham the social scene between placement students and office staff is much worse off for being in Daventry,

The office regularly went to the pub or to play golf, for christmas we also joined up with another office and went to Nottingham for a night out. The placement students have a weekly football kickabout in Daventry, the students also entered a team into a local 5-a-side league.